This week support
for MSAA was finally added to the R300g driver so that the Radeon X1000 graphics
cards and earlier can finally take advantage of anti-aliasing with this open-source
Gallium3D driver. In this article are some benchmarks of the MSAA performance
with a Radeon X1800XT, but even with this higher-end GPU when it comes to the
R300g support coverage, the anti-aliasing performance isn't really usable.

As mentioned in the article earlier this week, after the R600g Gallium3D driver
picked up MSAA support recently, the R300g driver finally received a similar treatment.
The multi-sample anti-aliasing level can be set through the "GALLIUM_MSAA"
environment variable and is currently exposed for the R500-class GPUs while enabling
it for R300/R400 GPUs can be done through an additional environment variable at
present until the support on the older hardware has been deemed stable. The earlier
article has many more details.

In this article are benchmarks of an ATI Radeon X1800XT (R520) when not forcing
any anti-aliasing and then when setting the 2x and 4x anti-aliasing modes through
GALLIUM_MSAA. There's also 6x MSAA that is supported by R300g, but with the OpenGL
frame-rate already being so slow at 4x, the 6x testing ended prematurely since
it was taking too bloody long to complete. All benchmarking was handled through
the Phoronix Test Suite.

Swap buffers wait was disabled for the Radeon (xf86-video-ati) driver during
this Linux OpenGL benchmarking. The Linux 3.8 kernel, libdrm Git, and Mesa 9.1-git
along with xf86-video-ati Git were used during this testing process for the freshest
code as of this week.

The mission at Phoronix since 2004 has centered around enriching the Linux hardware experience. In addition to supporting our site through advertisements, you can help by subscribing to Phoronix Premium. You can also use our Amazon.com shopping link when making online purchases or contribute to Phoronix through a PayPal tip or Bitcoin.